Misreading the tea leaves: Media can't figure out the tea party

Star Ledger ^ | 201004/ | Paul Mulshine

[Coleus]

Watching my fellow members of the media try to dissect the tea party movement is endlessly amusing. They tend to seize on the first thing they encounter and then employ it to describe the rest. The effect is that of a man approaching a smorgasbord, picking out the boiled potatoes, and then deciding Swedes must be vegetarians.

As a connoisseur of conservatism, I like to sample from all the plates. So when the tea partiers congregated on the steps of the Statehouse Thursday, I gravitated to the John Birch Society table.

Like the tea partiers, the Birch Society is something of a blank screen upon which people project their emotions. The actual subject matter of the society’s publications would put most Americans to sleep. Do you care how your congressman voted on H.R. 3183, the Energy-Water Appropriations bill? If so, you can find out by picking up the Freedom Index pamphlet the Birchers put out. I did and I found that the only House member with a 100 percent rating from the society is Ron Paul, the once and perhaps future presidential contender from Texas.

This is exactly the sort of thing that drives my fellow members of the mainstream media crazy. They want to put the John Birchers in one box, presumably a box filled with mobs of angry people holding pitchforks. But mention Ron Paul and they construct another box, one you might find in Amsterdam. It’s filled with advocates of legalized drugs and open prostitution.

Yet Paul, who first employed the tea party theme in his 2008 campaign, and the Birchers agree on most of the issues that matter these days. So who’s on the other side?

[Coleus]

A Tea Party rally in front of the Statehouse in Trenton on April 15, 2010.

[668 - Neighbor of the Beast]

They tend to seize on the first thing they encounter and then employ it to describe the rest.

"The Blind Men and the Elephant" by John Godfrey Saxe comes to mind. (Well, to my mind anyway!)

[righttackle44]

The Tea Party? LOL. Our local newspaper, the Arizona Republic, thinks that the Republic of Georgia is the one where Atlanta is located.

[csmusaret]

The media are Obama’s cheerleaders. Any protest of The Ones policies will be met with derision and bias instead of fair and objective reporting.

[Deagle]

They will never be able to look outside of their insulated shell - which is okay, they are as blind as the politicians to the changes that they helped wrought...

[VoiceOfBruck]

It’s called cognitive dissonance, the inability to comprehend something that doesn’t align with one’s preconceived notions.